Thanks to the painstaking work of a generation of researchers, lists of apprentices exist for many British guilds and towns and cities. The project team are looking for family historians who have found their ancestors in these lists. They can help connect the young people who became apprentices to evidence about the family they came from, which will allow for understanding much more about how apprenticeship worked.

If you have identified an ancestor of yours in one of the lists of apprentices in London or any other British town or city (or village!), then you could make a valuable contribution. To find out how to help by telling the research team about your apprentice ancestor, please visit the project website at www.patrickwallis.net

My Ancestor was an Apprentice is a research project led by Professor Patrick Wallis, of the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics. Contact: p.h.wallis@lse.ac.uk.

It is part of a long-running project on apprenticeship that has generated a number of academic articles and books, including Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe, published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press.